Mother Still Waiting To Exhale Guilt

Sixteen percent of all childhood cases of pneumonia and bronchitis are caused by secondhand smoke. So said the morning news.

Elizabeth Schuett was a lousy mother. So say I.

Guilt. Big time GUILT is what I feel every time I remind myself of the haze of secondhand cigarette smoke that surrounded my son for the first nine years of his life.

“You didn’t know any better, Mom,” he reassures every time I start kicking myself all over hell-and-half-of-Georgia for being so stupid. And I did too know better; surely I knew better. But the weed had me on a short leash.

I smoked everywhere and all of the time, blissfully ignorant of the stench I was making in a child’s world. I smoked like I was on some kind of destructive marathon. My infatuation with tobacco almost might have made sense had the cigarette manufacturers been paying me in direct proportion to my standing on the smog alert scale.

There were a few occasions, relatively few because he got tired of being outvoted, where my son even asked me not to smoke in the car because it bothered his eyes and made him cough. Pretty picture, huh? A helpless child strapped into his carseat while his mother puffs on down the road. I didn’t notice the stink (because I was the stink) but I did notice the noxious scum all over the inside of the car windows. Too bad I couldn’t have seen the inside of my child’s lungs that easily. Too bad I couldn’t have watched as the crud I exhaled found its insidious way into his fresh, new body.

This child trusted me, and why not? That’s what mommas are for, isn’t it? After all, wasn’t I the one who fed and comforted him? The one who scratched his back and kissed his fat baby toes just to hear him giggle? The one who held him on her lap and read to him the adventures of Winnie the Pooh? What a grotesque tableau we must have made. Angel and addict. Innocent and imbecile!

Maybe I can plead ignorance. After all, I was only 17 when smoking became something I did daily instead of just at sorority slumber parties. And as everyone knows, 17-year-olds are immortal. Besides, I knew that I could stop whenever I wanted to.

But I didn’t want to. In fact, when I was 25 and down in Miami for a company (Eastern Air Lines) physical, I asked the doc if he thought I maybe ought to give up the weed. He looked up from my arm, the one with the rubber tube wrapped around it and the needle stuck in it and said: “What the hell for?”

As he spoke, the cigarette he held loosely clamped between his teeth shook and splattered ashes all over the blood sample he was collecting. So I lit up and we finished our chat about this and that.

Then I got married. My husband never said anything about my smoking - what’s to say? He smoked too. Many’s the evening we would lie in bed reading as he puffed on a big, brown stogie and I sucked my way through half-a-dozen of the unfiltered Egyptian ovals I had graduated to. By the way, they smelled like dirty feet and tasted little better. And the bedroom walls changed color.

Eight years later, and 16 years into my habit, my husband and I brought home our first and only child, a son. We were pretty happy about being able to provide him with the best of everything - home, education, travel - and secondhand smoke. (By this time my husband could afford expensive cigars.)

And so it went. Puff and cough. Cough and puff … ad infinitum.

But one wintry day, in January of 1977, I dumped the habit, aired out the house and sent the drapes out to be cleaned.

It’s been almost 20 years but I still have nightmares every time I see a young mother pushing a stroller with one hand and puffing on a cigarette with the other. It makes me want to call my asthmatic son and apologize all over again.

xxxx